rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

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retirement

The Big Day, 6th Grade Graduation

The big day. Exsel graduates elementary school! He is in the last 6th grade class in Elysian Heights Elementary School’s 100 year history. (It will become a K-5 arts magnet next year) I remember the 1st day we got there, May 2015, the very end of the school year. I found out that I HAD to bring him to school, otherwise he would be “truant”! So we arrived just down the street from us on Baxter & Echo Park – to this sweet old school, elementary school. He would get to attend the last 2 weeks of 2nd grade –…

On Retirement from a Life in the Theater

Tomorrow I’ll pick up my final pay check. It’s my “last day of service” at the great University of Southern California, where I’ve taught in the School of Dramatic Arts for 31 years. I started as a simple adjunct instructor with a single improv class, and I ended up improvising my way to becoming a full-time “Associate Professor of Theater Practice”. Non- tenured… but still impressive in my parents’ eyes, and not anything I could have anticipated or imagined when I graduated college in 1969 with a degree in Frisbee. That’s almost 50 years ago… during which time I grew…

Still Alice?

I finally watched STILL ALICE with Juliane Moore on Netflix. I was sitting in my deceased father’s red leather chair in my bedroom, and my 8-year-old, adopted nephew-to-be, from Indonesia, was sitting on the huge, king-size bed, playing with his iPad. I had heard that Ms Moore’s performance, which won an Academy Award for her, was spectacular, but that the movie was only so-so. In fact, I had been warned not to watch it just the day before by a German artiste who absolutely hated it. Nevertheless, I watched it and… I was completely captivated from the start. Sure, it…

An Homage to “Teachers”

General Constance Greene. Lieutenant Colonel Joan Colaprete. Those are the names of the two “teachers” in my life. Both high school English teachers. Both members of the legion of “teachers” we all hopefully remember from our childhoods throughout the course of our lives. Both were strong and unrelenting. Both eccentric and inspiring. They set the bar high so their students could rise. They got the best out of us. And they planted the seed in me, for the hunger to learn. I use the word “teacher” as an homage to the great John Steinbeck, the Mark Twain of the mid…

The “R” word

5/13/14 (On what would have been my mother’s 93rd Birthday; she died in 1999) It used to be the “C” word. C-c-c-ommitment. Normally a young man’s word. Why ever get married, settle down, have a family, limit your (sexual) options? What about freedom? Opportunity? Spontaneity? Improvisation? Living in the moment? Be here now? What about the 60s? Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll? I’ll tell you “what”. Life is what. It has a way of catching up with even the best (free-est) of us? Leaving us older, lonelier, less and less healthy and attractive with each passing year. Maybe even…

on retirement

“RETIREMENT”… with guaranteed income and/or a pension doesn’t exist in our country anymore. And SOCIAL SECURITY simply isn’t enough. The basic “contract” with workers and has been “broken”. “Work long and hard and you will be guaranteed a financially secure “old age” and “retirement”. Sorry, that’s an idea of the past. Yet WHY is it that US postal workers, can retire at 55 years young? And union Teamsters, who are guaranteed 75% of their working salaries after they retire – for the rest of their lives – WHY are so well taken care of? While the rest of us hard-working…

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